So I guess we will have to wait and see. For now, we can laugh and smile and be happy. In smiling, however, there is a sadness for those who are unable to laugh as often as ourselves, and a tear might come to my eye when I think of those whose time in Australia is not as happy as Albana’s was.
Albana has told me a little bit about herself, her family and her country. Sitting in the sun of our schoolyard I say thank you before the bell rings and we leave for class.
Taha’s Story: Adam’s Version
by Adam Bennett, aged 12
Hi, my name is Taha and this is my story.
I was just a normal thirty-year-old woman. I lived in a country called Iraq. I had a job in a big office building, everything was great. But then there were the others. They came and took over the country. They put new laws down so that we couldn’t talk our own language—it was terrible. My mum was an old lady so she did not worry about learning the new language. So she could only talk in secret.
One day I went to work early in the morning. I parked my car in its spot and took the lift to the top floor. Just as I reached my office, the phone rang. I ran in and just got it. It was mum. I had to talk to her in the forbidden language. She said she wanted me to buy her some bread and milk. My boss walked past. I slammed down the phone. He might have heard me but he was a good old man, so I thought he wouldn’t turn me in to the secret police. I worked hard for the rest of the day on a new project. I decided it was time to go home. I went out to my car and hopped in. Two black cars came screeching up beside me. I was stuck, so I calmly walked up to ask them to move. When I reached their car two men jumped out and grabbed me. It was the secret police! I said to the men that I had done nothing wrong but they just hit me and kept on hitting me. They blacked out my eyes and put me in the car. They took me for a downhill drive. After ten minutes I blacked out and fell asleep.
When I woke up three days later I was in a dark damp room about two by two metres wide. It had a hole in the ground for a toilet and a tap above for a shower. The water in the tap was extremely cold. All the food and drink I got was a glass of cold water and a piece of stale bread. I would soak the bread in the water so that it became soft and easy to swallow. I had one blanket and a soft foam pillow for a bed. In the winter the temperature would drop to about two degrees but in the summer it got to around fifty degrees. In the summer I would sit under the cold dirty water of the shower.
Every day I would be woken very early, blindfolded and taken to a large room. In the room they would use a pulley to get me up to a large ceiling fan. My arms would be tied behind my back and hooked onto the fan. My body would overbalance and my head would face the ground. They would turn the fan on very fast for about two to three hours a day. When I got back to my room the glass of water and the piece of bread was ready.
Sometimes I would be interrogated and threatened. They would poke my eyes with needles and burn me with cigarette butts. Because of this I am now blind in one eye, have lower back problems and can’t feel two fingers.
One night I was woken and taken from my room. They blindfolded me and pushed me into the car. We went for a very long downhill drive. It was very rocky and we took a lot of sharp turns. The car stopped. One of the men grabbed me and got out of the car. One of the others pulled off my blindfold. It was the first time I had seen light in six months! It was unbelievable.
There were thousands of little gaols. I was taken to one of them. They pushed me in and slammed the door. Two days later I was taken and given an electric shock. I became very sick and had to go to a special hospital for three weeks.
When I returned I was put in a different gaol. After two days in the gaol I realised that there was a small hole in the left hand side wall. I poured a cup of water down the hole. A young man yelled back. That young man became one of my best friends. We talked for hours at a time. He really helped me get through the devastation. The only problem was that I never got to see his face.
One day one of the guards heard us talking. He came and took that young man away. I battled on for another couple of days. Then after 200 days of hell, a soldier came and let me out. The sunlight hurt my eyes!
The war was on again. I ran into the hills. I found my way back to my family. I escaped to Jordan where I applied for a visa to Australia. It took two years to get on that plane.
I got a phone call after three months living in Australia. It was that young man. He had just got married to a beautiful lady in Japan. He gave me his email address. We mail each other every week and still to this day I have never seen that young man’s face.
Taha’s Story: Chelsea’s Version
by Chelsea June, aged 12
Hi, my name is Taha and I come from Iraq. I had a good life and a good family but then the war started between Iraq and Iran and things turned bad. So in the end when I was thirty I moved to Australia. Here’s my story …
I was nine when we moved from North Iraq to Baghdad. My original language was Kurdish but the new laws were set and we were not allowed to talk Kurdish but had to talk Arabic. As my mother was an older woman she did not bother to learn Arabic. She only learnt words so that she could buy things.
Later on in my life I met my husband Saad and we had our first baby girl child named Larna.
One day, while my husband, Larna and myself were walking down the street, Larna told me to back up. She stopped at an apple stand and asked if she could have an apple. I could not say no to my child, so I asked if I could just have a single apple, but they didn’t sell just single apples, they only sold kilos and half a kilo. So I asked for half a kilo which cost seventy-five cents and my husband’s monthly pay was six dollars.
After a lot of trying, I finally got a job doing scientist work. One day while I was at work my mother rang to ask me if I could get milk and bread on the way home. My boss overheard me talking in a different language. I had to tell him what I was saying because he couldn’t understand me. I could tell he didn’t believe me.
At four o’clock I finished work and walked out to my car. I got in but found myself trapped. Two cars were blocking my car. I turned on the engine and waited for a while but they wouldn’t move. So I got out of my car and tapped on their window and asked them to move. Next thing I know they were out of the car. They blindfolded me and then I was in the back of their car. I was so scared.
When they took the blindfold off me I was in a small room. It was so small that if I walked two steps I would hit the wall. There were no windows. The only thing in the room was a shower and a toilet which was ground level. I tried the shower and as I expected the water was as cold as cold, and dirty.
I fell asleep. I woke being shocked. The same men were back once again. They blindfolded me and when they took it off I was in a different room. Now I was really scared. They sat me in a chair and started asking me questions. If I didn’t answer they would hit me. This happened every day for weeks and probably months. They started to do more things. Instead of using ashtrays they would put their cigarettes out on my hands. They also dipped needles in acid and put the needle in my eye. When this happened I was sent to a women’s hospital for a couple of days. They also put clips on my tongue with electric shocks. Every couple of days they would hang me from the fan and I would most likely be up there for two hours. Every day I would just feel like dying in the gaol.
Then one day the men were back and blindfolded me as usual. When the blindfold came off, I was in an underground hole. I could tell it was up in the mountains by all the trees around the hole. There must have been at least 300 people. I thought that I was to stay here but all they were doing was picking up more people. When they left they blindfolded me again. When they took the blindfold off me, I was in the street. I could tell I was home!
I was so glad to see my husband and daughter. According to them I had been gone seven and a half months. I had had enough of this life and I made up my mind I was going to go to Australia. Two of my brothers lived in Newcastle working as dentists.
&nbs
p; I then moved to Jordan. My brothers would send me $500 every month because I needed $5000 in my account. When I had all the money, I could then go to Australia.
When I got to Australia they took me on a tour of the city and asked questions about Australia. I had reading and writing tests and the points added up to 115, which got the visa to stay in Australia. When I got my visa I moved to Newcastle to live with my brothers for a while and then I moved to South Australia.
It has been sixteen years since I lived in Iraq. I sometimes get harassed in the street because people think I’m an Afghanistan spy after the September 11 bomb attack. They sometimes pull off my scarf and then start saying go back to where you came from and I just tell them that I am an ordinary person but I wear my scarf of religion.
I love Australia and I love living in South Australia and now I feel safe living here.
The Scar
by Alexandra Drakulic, aged 15
I could have written about absolutely anything since I was born in Bosnia and lived there during the war. I would have liked to tell you how my family escaped from Sarajevo and came to Australia, but since it is my best friend’s birthday in seven days’ time, I will tell you about her.
Well to start from the beginning, my best friend was Renata and I have known her ever since I could remember, or ever since I was able to know for myself. She lived just across from me, so we were always together. Renata was Muslim and I am Orthodox but this didn’t matter. My sister used to tell us that we were joined at the hip. We went to pre-school together and we used to always pick fights with boys and then see which one had more bruises and scars. Well the reason that I am writing this is the scar on my leg reminds me of the war every time I look at it.
Renata and I started primary school and at that time the war had begun, but we were too young to understand what was going on and thought that this was only another day off school. In the beginning every one didn’t actually believe that there was going to be a war, but in less than a week the city of Sarajevo was filled with army stations and barricades. At that time many people left but the majority stayed, thinking that this was only temporary. Within one month the power was cut and we had to walk about thirteen kilometres to get our water. Everyone had to help with this because the more people who went, the more water we could carry.
As the war was happening Renata and I used to play in my flat and her family would often stay at my house since we had a storeroom which was dug into the hill. At that time I realised that the war wasn’t going to go away since there were more and more people coming into the city from surrounding villages. As kids we had our parents telling us all the things that we should do, but we always used to sneak out and go to our day-care centre or our school which had been turned into army centres. We had our little petty fights but we always managed to get over them.
But this was not to last.
As the peace treaty was signed with the UN and the Bosnian government, people were moving around more and we were allowed to play outside our flats during the day. While we were playing a game with all of the other kids who lived in surrounding buildings, one of the adults started yelling and all of a sudden the troops that were behind our flats started shooting. Every one jumped back and Renata and I hid under a car that was parked not far away from us. Then there was quiet and no one moved. It was as if time stopped for a split second. When I looked up I saw my cousin and Renata’s mum yelling at us to get out from underneath the car. We climbed out quickly and started running towards the flats. To us this was funny and we were laughing.
When we reached my flats the booming started heavily and the shooting was so loud we had to cover our ears. As we were running in to the flats a grenade fell close to us. My cousin pulled me up off the ground, and as he was doing this I heard a loud scream which I was able to hear with my ears closed. As I turned around I felt a strong sharp pain in my leg and fell on the ground. Tarik, my cousin went to cover my eyes but I saw what I didn’t want to believe. Renata was lying on the ground in a pool of blood, unconscious. Next to her were her mother and my parents. My cousin picked me up and then I realised that I had blood all over my leg and I couldn’t feel it.
After that, it took me a while to realise what just happened, the fact that I had lost my best friend.
I was taken to the hospital because, on the impact of the explosion, a piece of metal got stuck in my leg and it needed to be taken out. When we reached the hospital I was in a lot of pain and I was feeling faint. But most of all I was scared of the hospital, because it is different when you hear about a war hospital and when you are actually in one. There was a lot of blood and injured people around, but what struck me was that there were dead people there that died before the doctors could get to them, and body parts everywhere.
At that time I passed out. When I woke up I was at home and the piece of metal was still there. One of my dad’s friends was a vet before the war and he took it out with my sister’s biology set.
The next day I saw Renata’s mother and my mother talking and I came up to her and asked where was Renata. I was expecting her to tell me that she died but to my surprise she answered me with a smile on her face. Renata was still alive and in the hospital. That afternoon my mother took me to visit her and I was so happy to see her.
I spent the whole day talking to her about the things that we did before and what we were planning to do for my birthday, which was coming up.
The next day my mother came to by bedroom and sat on by bed. She told me that during the night Renata died from internal bleeding and that we were going to go to her funeral in a week. I was upset, but satisfied that I at least said goodbye in a kind of way to her. I didn’t get to go to her funeral because the shooting was really bad.
When I was leaving Sarajevo, Renata’s mother gave me her bracelet, one that Renata wore all the time.
Now all I have to remember one of my best friends is a bracelet and a scar on my leg.
The Blue Eyes that Grieve
by Zara Al-Hosany Al-Shara, aged 15
Zeinab is a sweet, slight and softly spoken girl. She seems just like any other twelve-year-old, with beautiful fair skin, a lovely smile, her head covered in the hijab. However there is something about Zeinab’s big blue eyes that disturbs me. They look deep, tired … perhaps a little older than her twelve years. This is understandable when one realises the pain, suffering and loss that Zeinab has endured in the past year.
Zeinab is a refugee from Iraq. Like many, her father made the decision to flee his oppressive country in the search for peace, freedom and a better opportunity for his large family. However, this dream was to be the beginning of the end. A tragic end for Zeinab’s family.
Australia was the destination, a long way to go, but this family of seven had suffered a great deal and lost everything. They had been a happy, wealthy family living in Najaf, a city in Iraq. The conflict between Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people changed all that.
The Iraqi residents disliked Saddam as their president and wanted to change him. They held a strike that then started a war between Najaf and Karbala, another city. One of Zeinab’s uncles got involved in the war as well. The family didn’t take any action until seven years later, but the constant pressures and insecurity led to Zeinab’s uncle deciding to leave Iraq and go to another country, where they could live in peace. Her father was always afraid of Saddam because his brother’s family had left Iraq illegally and Saddam didn’t know where they were. Zeinab’s father was continually threatened in order to try to find out where his brother went. This placed them in even more danger.
Zeinab’s family decided to leave Iraq and travel to Iran as refugees. Firstly they drove to Saudi Arabia and from there they caught an aeroplane to Iran. Moving to Iran wasn’t a good idea because now they didn’t have any money or a place to live and didn’t even know Iranian. So they went to a place like the Salvation Army for help. The Salvos helped them a lot by providing them with food, clothing and shelter for six months
. Finally her father found a job.
All of the family moved from Tehran to Quam because it was cheaper there. Her father’s wage wasn’t much, so they rented a cold and dark basement to live in. Zeinab and her sisters went to an Arabic school where there were mainly Arab refugees. The family were in such bad condition that sometimes they didn’t even have enough money to buy food. They were so poor that they couldn’t afford textbooks and usually slept without eating. They each owned only two sets of clothing, that’s how bad their lifestyle was. Zeinab’s father was saving up money to come to Australia. Her mother’s brother lived in Australia and tried to sponsor them but it wasn’t accepted. But her father so badly wanted to give his children a better future and he knew he could not do that living in Iran in such poor conditions, so the family would have to go to Australia illegally. Zeinab’s father found a person who said that he could help them get to Australia. He said, ‘If you want to go to Australia you have to take an aeroplane to Malaysia and there a man will come and put you on a boat that will take you to Indonesia. From there you have to take another boat to Australia.’
The problem was the cost. It would cost them US$1000 each person, not including the flight from Iran to Malaysia. They didn’t have enough money so Zeinab’s father borrowed US$8000 from his friends. He agreed to pay them back when he reached Australia.
Zeinab’s father left Iran with his wife and five children. They were so happy that they were jumping for joy. Zeinab remembers how happy her parents were for the first time in a long time. The family was looking forward to a peaceful life in Australia with no tension or hardship.
Once they arrived in Malaysia it was all arranged. In Indonesia a man came up to them and took them to the boat that was meant to take them to Australia. Zeinab often has nightmares of the old battered boat and the look on her father’s face when he saw it. ‘It was very small and old. It seemed like it would sink at any moment,’ she says. There were more than 400 people waiting to get on the boat when there was really meant to be half that. Zeinab remembers her father arguing with the man. He said, ‘I am not going in this boat, it is a derelict boat.’ The man replied, ‘Go now or never! You are not getting your money back if you decide not to go. Besides, you’ll be safe.’ So Zeinab’s father had no choice but to travel on that shabby boat. He was scared, Zeinab could tell, but they were happy at the same time.
Dark Dreams Page 9